24 août 2012

Recent studies allege a system of abuse targeting children detained by Israel's military court system.Ramallah, occupied Palestinian territories - A dirty
mattress fills up a space barely two metres long and one metre wide. A
suffocating stench emanating from the toilet hovers over the windowless
room, and a light turned on 24/7 means sleep is a distant dream. This is
the infamous Cell 36 in Al Jalameh Prison in Israel. It's one of the
cells that many Palestinian children have either heard of or, worse,
been inside when placed in solitary confinement.
The children imprisoned here are most often taken from their homes
between midnight and 5am. Most don't even see it coming. In one case, in
Beit Ummar near Bethlehem, Israeli soldiers detained a Palestinian boy
after reportedly taking some of the house's doors off their hinges. Most
of the children detained live close to "friction points", areas close
to Israeli settlements, roads used by settlers or near the separation
wall. And their offence is almost always throwing stones at settlers or
troops.
These vivid details emerged recently in a report based on the
testimonies of more than 300 Palestinian children, which were collected
over four years. The study by Defence for Children International, Bound,
Blindfolded and Convicted: Children Held in Military Detention
highlights a pattern of abuse towards children detained under the
Israeli military court system. In the past 11 years, DCI estimates that
around 7,500 children, some as young as 12, have been detained,
interrogated and imprisoned within this system. This is about 500-700
children per year, or nearly two children every day.
Mohammad S, from the northern West Bank town of Tulkarem, was 16 when
he was arrested, according to the report. It was 2:30am when Israeli
soldiers dragged him out of bed. He was blindfolded and verbally abused
and taken to an unknown destination, where he says he was forced to lay
down in the cold for an hour. He was later taken to an interrogation
centre near Nablus at around 11am, and only then was he allowed to drink
some water and use the bathroom, after he underwent a strip search.
Tied and blindfolded still, he was then taken to Al Jalameh, near Haifa
in Israel. There he was taken to Cell 36, where he was forced to spend
his first night sleeping on the floor because there was no mattress or
blanket.
Mohammad says he spent 17 days in solitary confinement in Cell 36 and
Cell 37, interrupted only by interrogations. Mohammad was reportedly
interrogated for two to three hours every day, while sitting on a low
seat with his hands tied to the chair.The most crucial hours
"The first 48 hours after a child is taken are the most important
because that's when the most abuse happens," DCI's lawyer Gerard Horton
said. Children taken from their homes in the night are blindfolded and
bound and made to lie face down or up on the floors of military
vehicles, according to the centre's report.
Very rarely are parents told where their child is being taken, and,
unlike Israeli children from within either Israel or the settlements in
the occupied West Bank, Palestinian minors are reportedly not allowed to
have a parent present before or during initial interrogation, and
generally do not see a lawyer until after their interrogation is over.
Specifically, Israeli children have access to a lawyer within 48
hours and those under the age of 14 cannot be imprisoned. Palestinian
children, however, can be jailed even if they are as young as 12 and,
like adults, can be held in jail without having formal charges against
them for up to 188 days.
"The key issue is one of equality. If two children, a Palestinian and
an Israeli, are caught throwing stones at each other, then one will be
processed in a juvenile justice system and one in a military court,"
Horton said.
"They have completely different rights. It's hard to justify this
after 45 years of occupation. It's not a question of whether offences
are committed. What we are saying is children should not be treated
completely differently."
As soon as children are taken from their homes, and placed inside an
Israeli military vehicle, they are often kicked or slapped, according to
testimonies obtained by DCI. Some said they were laughed at and others
said they heard cameras clicking.NightmaresBecause children are often taken
late at night, they are driven to the nearest settlement to wait until
Israeli police interrogators open up shop in the morning. This means
children are sometimes placed out in the cold or rain for many hours.
Requests for water or using the bathroom are most often denied, and
children are taken straight to interrogation after a night of little
sleep.
That's what Ahmad F said happened to him. A 15-year-old from 'Iraq
Burin village, just outside Nablus, he was arrested in July 2011. He was
taken to the nearby Huwwara interrogation centre, where he was left
outside from 5am until 3pm. At one point, soldiers brought a dog. "They
brought the dog's food and put it on my head," Ahmad told DCI. "Then
they put another piece of bread on my trousers near my genitals, so I
tried to move away but [the dog] started barking. I was terrified."
During interrogation, many children reported being facing with slurs
and threatened with physical violence. In a small number of cases,
interrogators have reportedly threatened minors with rape.
In 29 per cent of cases studied by DCI, Arabic-speaking children were
either shown or given documentation written in Hebrew to sign. An
Israeli spokesperson denied this to Al Jazeera, saying "the norm is that
interrogations in Arabic should be either recorded or written in
Arabic". Israeli officials did say, however, they had identified 13
cases from the report where children had signed a confession written in
Hebrew. Yet the spokesperson maintained that video recordings of those
interrogations had been available, should the lawyers acting for the
children doubt the accuracy of the written Hebrew statements.
After children sign a "confession", they are brought before an
Israeli military court. Since 2009, an Israeli spokesperson said,
children have faced juvenile military courts. Most often, that's the
first time the minor will see their lawyer. The confession is generally
the primary evidence against the child, say DCI officials. Other
evidence will often consist of a statement by an interrogator, and
sometimes a soldier.
Because so few are granted bail, children face a legal dilemma: they
can ask the lawyer to challenge the system - and by doing so potentially
wait, locked up, for four to six months - or plead guilty and get a two
or three month prison sentence for a "first offence".Pleading guilty
"So, very rarely does anyone challenge the system," said DCI's
Horton, as the quickest way to be released is to plead guilty. This goes
some way to explain why, according to the military courts, the
conviction rate for adults and children in 2010 was 99.74 per cent.
According to DCI, some fifty to sixty per cent of the time, children
are taken to prisons inside Israel, making it difficult for parents to
visit. "Some parents are denied permits on unspecified 'security
grounds'. For the others, the bureaucracy can take up to two months to
get a permit, which means if their children are sentenced to less time,
they will not receive a visit," Horton said. "However, some permits are
processed in less than two months, and those children sentenced to more
time will also generally receive visits."
The allegations of what seems to be a deliberate system of abuse
appear to be corroborated by another report published by a group of
British jurists. The UK government-backed delegation of nine lawyers,
with human rights, crime and child welfare backgrounds, concluded that
Israel's soldiers regularly breach the UN Convention on the Rights of
the Child (UNCRC) and the Fourth Geneva Convention, of which Israel is a
signatory.
Their report, Children in Military Custody, attributed much of
Israel's reluctance to treat Palestinian children in accordance with
international norms to "a belief, which was advanced to us by a military
prosecutor, that every Palestinian child is a 'potential terrorist'".
The lawyers said this seemed to be "the starting point of a spiral of
injustice, and one which only Israel, as the Occupying Power in the West
Bank, can reverse".
Israel's practice of holding children "for substantial periods in
solitary confinement would, if it occurred, be capable of amounting to
torture", the report concluded. Of all the children represented by DCI,
12 per cent reported being held in solitary confinement for an average
of 11 days.Denial
The Israel Security Agency (ISA), also known as Shin Bet, denied that
children were mistreated under the military court system, calling
claims to the contrary "utterly baseless". The ISA also said that claims
regarding the prevention of legal counsel were also completely
groundless.
"No one questioned, including minors being questioned, is kept alone
in a cell as a punitive measure or in order to obtain a confession,"
said the ISA in a statement when the Guardian first released a special
report about the status of child detainees in Israel.
The ISA also said that it provides minors special protection because
of their age and adheres to "international treaties of which the State
of Israel is a signatory, and according to Israeli law, including the
right to legal counsel and visits by the Red Cross".
Speaking to Al Jazeera, an Israeli spokesperson accused the DCI
report of bias, and refuted the group's finding that the majority of
children prosecuted were charged with throwing stones: "This was the
basis for only 40 per cent of the indictments filed against minors in
the West Bank ... the young age of offenders is not relevant to the
gravity of the act: it has been proven beyond doubt that a stone thrown
by a 15-year-old child can be no less fatal than a stone thrown by an
adult."
Stone-throwing can prove deadly, stressed the spokesperson, citing a
case from September 2011, when an Israeli settler and his one-year-old
son were killed after their car overturned as a result of stones hurled
at them. "Two Palestinians from Halhul confessed to throwing the stone
which caused the deaths of Asher and Yonatan. The stone was hurled from a
driving car," the spokesperson said. The official said that children
were also involved in grenade throwing, the use of explosives, shooting
and assault
The spokesperson also denied that the ISA used isolation as an
interrogation technique or as punishment to exert confessions out of
minors. "There are certain cases in which an interrogee will be held
alone for a few days at the most, in order to prevent information in
his/her possession from leaking to other terrorist activists in the same
detention facility, which could compromise the interrogation of the
suspect. Note that even in these cases, the interrogee is not held in
absolute confinement, but is entitled to meet with Red Cross
representatives, medical staff etc."
Furthermore, the spokesperson rejected the idea that pleading guilty
was the quickest way out of the system for a defendant, deeming the
accusation "misleading, distorted, and premised upon incorrect
information".
"Should a minor defendant choose to plead 'not guilty' and challenge
the prosecutorial evidence by proceeding to a full trial and mounting a
good-faith defence, military courts will, in the vast majority of the
cases, conduct the hearings very efficiently, sometimes even in a few
weeks."
Yet, since the DCI and UK reports came out, "there's no substantive
change on the ground", Horton said. "The response by the military
authorities has been to start talking about making some changes and
amending the military orders. But when you look at the details, the
changes are of little substance."
"In reality, what we are seeing is a de facto annexation of most of
the West Bank; it's not a temporary military occupation," he concluded.
"The military courts are an integral part of this process used to
control the population."